The guarded flame

Front matter

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II HIS fame had come to him very slowly

From the scientific world recognition had been with¬ held for two main reasons. The big men are necessarily too busy with their own work to keep a sharp lookout for new¬ comers : they rely on the smaller men to do the watching, to present for promotion in due course fit and worthy candi¬ dates for the unpaid posts of honour. But the small men are warped with prejudice, bound in chains of class-association : only in their own dull ranks will they seek the candidate.

At the outset of his career there was much against Richard Burgoyne from the point of view of small “professional” minds. He was a young man of ample means and good family ; as the son of a country gentleman he had gone, quite in the ordinary course of events, to Oxford — to Christ Church. Here he had taken his M.D. degree; but here also he had hunted regularly, he had shot often, and he had once ridden one of his own private horses in a steeplechase.

These were damaging facts — not malicious fancies — to be known and noted by all. He was a clever young man, if you like, with the loose, slapdash, amateurish cleverness which sits very well on a young lord, but which cannot be accepted seriously at meetings in Albemarle Street or soirees at South Kensington. A swaggering, horsey young man with a certain pen aptitude and the sort of shallow receptive brain which absorbs all the floating half-formed notions of the moment — whose first printed paper was an article in one of the reviews on Colour and Temper of our English-bred horses .

Editors of heavy reviews liked young Mr Burgoyne’s articles, but they found him indurated and inductile. Editors always want the new article to be the old article in new words, but this contributor would give them something different. When told there was room for some more Horses, he wrote The Ratchet-movement i?i Clocks and Hnma7i beings ; or the Lazv of Compensatiori for Live and Dead things. When he received the flattering information that readers liked his clocks and wished to have clocks again, he sent in Ethics before the daw?i of Reason. He wrote so many articles that it was impossible for the rank and file of the dull scientific army altogether to ignore them. They owned it was clever clap-trap — as good clap-trap as you were likely to get from an amateur.

He was thirty-two when he published The Magic Mirror, his first book. He had used the old simile of the internal mirror for the phenomenon of consciousness, and he had furnished his title-page with a sub-title : As in a Glass Darkly. The book met with a popular success which in later years he him¬ self regretted ; which, at the time, minor physiologists and minor psychologists could not pardon. Oh, alliterative clap-trap ! Yet there was good work in the book : enough, one might have guessed, for some big candid mind to see, shadowed forth as in a glass darkly, the better things that soon were coming.

Of his private life very little now was known. In another year it was said that he had bought a house — the newspapers called it an estate — on the south coast, and that there he was living in complete retirement. He had, in truth, during the ten years since he left Oxford, lived a varied and a busy life. He had worked for twelve months in the clinical wards of the Edinburgh hospital; for twelve months Anton Nelcker, Pro¬ fessor of Biology at the Josephinum, Vienna, could have said what he was doing ; the astronomers at the observatory, Williams College, U.S.A., had known him for nearly a year; he had been to Borneo with the eclipse expedition; he had travelled in South America by himself, and had been through the forests of Brazil with Benecker, in his final search for the trimorphous orchids ; but he had done very little hunting and shooting at home in England. He was alone in the world — parents dead, an only sister married ; he was a man of means and leisure — what did it matter to anyone else how and where he amused himself?

i4 THE GUARDED FLAME

From the house by the sea came in three years the Bases and Begi?mings — two ponderous volumes. Here was something commanding attention : a heavy piece that, merely because of its calibre, the sheer weight of metal thrown, called for expert criticism. One could of course say that, in spite of weight of metal and the noise it made, it had less range than a pop-gun. All the small people said it. And that dreadful clap-trap alliteration again ! Will he never drop it ? But to big people, this book was less like a gun than a quarry — a thought-quarry that a big man might work in boldly and without shame. “For the leading idea of this treatise,” said Atmore, a really big man, in a preface, “ I am indebted to the ingenious argument and illumining speculation contained in the third chapter of Mr Burgoyne’s Bases and Beginnings .”

This preface caused a change of song in the small-voiced chorus. “ What is this man ? ” — they sang. “ Is he a bi¬ ologist, a physiologist, a physicist, a naturalist, a botanist, a geologist, a palaeontologist, a morphologist ? This is our diffi¬ culty : let him plainly say which he is and we shall know how to deal with him.”

It did not seem to occur to anyone that the man might be none and yet all of these things.

At this period of his career it was that there leaked out — through the public press — a most damaging fact. In his silent house at Whitebridge, he habitually dressed for dinner. Now the frock-coated professional gang knew what to call him. They called him “the dress-clothes philosopher,” and crowed with glee as they observed the swiftly disastrous effect wrought by this opprobrious epithet upon his reputation in the thoughts of the large and untrained public that had liked The Magic Mirror.

Then from the silent house came forth that truly great woik, the Mental Physiology , in which he dropped for ever the word psychology. In this work he first touched his analysis of thought : bridging the void between the exposition of mechanical process and the intellectual concept of resultant mental action. It was an attempt to answer the old despairing cry : One can follow the molecular changes that occur when one thinks, but one is as far off as ever from understand¬ ing how or why one thinks ! But it was more than this : it was a revelation, as in a flash of dazzling light, of the power of thought that lay stored in the man himself.

To him, there was no mystery. For him the dual aspect was unified. To him the oneness of objective and subjective phenomena was clear. One could not say that he made it clear to others, but he conveyed to earnest students the con¬ viction that it was clear to him. It was as though his mind had passed that barrier of intellect that stops us all : as though he could himself most firmly grasp the unthinkable idea. Across the dark border-line of thought, he stood in the strong light, beckoning, saying, “ Here is the widening avenue along which all minds must progress.” He has gone a little farther than the rest. That is all.

Casual students were only sure of one thing about the book : it infallibly proved that the brain is the organ and seat of thought, because it infallibly made your head ache.

It was reserved for one who on many occasions had been quick in hailing genius with complete and splendid praise, now to honour Richard Burgoyne. Huxley, in a letter to Banks, said that not since the publication of the Origin of Species had he found such difficulty in mastering the contents of a book, but in this case, as in that other, the book was royally worth the patient effort needed for its mastery.

Slowly, as the years rolled, the wonderful books followed one another. A huge treatise like the Organised Chaos , pamphlets of five hundred pages like the U?iiversal Republic or the Structural Principles , vast, four-volumed, elaborated compendiums like the Rhythmic Curves , or the Causes a?id Conse¬ quences — book after book. Slowly, as the long years rolled, his fame waxed greater and greater. The big men called him Friend, Brother, Master. In many tongues, in many lands, the fame was chronicled. Far and near men were carving his name on tablets that they hoped would last for ever — the pages of their own books. No really big man, no matter what his department of knowledge or conjecture, could write a book without putting in the name again and again and again. He was not a biologist, a physicist, a morphologist, etc., etc. All the realm of human knowledge was his. He had no plan or fixed intention, but it seemed that, if he lived, he would write a book for every province of his realm. He had risen high above envy, had soared beyond the wings of hate : down, down beneath him, on the immeasurably distant plain, the little men were singing to his glory.

“ Oh, Causes and Consequences ! ” sang the little men. “ He has gone back to his glorious alliterative titles. We always loved his alliterative titles, and so we always sang.”

He was fifty-six when he married his Sybil, the only child of Joseph Randle, the geologist.

Old Randle’s modest country house at Woking was one of the very few houses in which he stayed as a highly-prized but most infrequent visitor. Sybil used to help her father in his plodding, unceasing work — a wise and learned girl at fourteen, who writes official letters, makes notes, and copies diagrams as another girl would keep poultry, or do wool-work. She was full of veneration for Mr Burgoyne — the great light : flushing with pride when he spoke to her, listening with long-drawn breath, while he talked to papa, mamma, and their neighbours at the little dinner-party which always crowned the brief visit, making lines on her white forehead and contracting her strong eyebrows by her effort to frame an intelligent thought in fairly intelligible words when compelled to speak before him , praying to the unseen forces that govern thought and speech not in his eyes to make her seem a stammering, red-cheeked fool.

When poor papa died, he came to the funeral ; and she watched him through her tears across the open grave. The world had turned grey in honour of the grey dead man ; grey clouds moved slowly while the soft rain fell ; and all about the fresh-turned earth, the noble group had gathered like grey shadows. One was tall and thin, wrapt in the long cloak, slouch hat in hand, with bowed head — the one that she had never seen except in pictures. Behind them stood shadows more vague : Fellows of the Royal Society, representatives of the universities, meaningless forms on the drifting grey back¬ ground of her dazed thoughts — his old colleagues from Liver¬ pool, the staff of the Museum in Jermyn Street, humble old friends beckoned to their places on the fringe of the mourning circle, by the dead hand.

But he was king of the shadows : as she saw him weep, her tears fell faster, till the shadows faded and were gone, and she and her mother stood alone beside the earth-filled trench.

He came back three days after the funeral and asked her to be his wife. At fifty-six, he was splendid — never a strong man really, but the life in him most wonderful. The time had come, he said, for him to think of marriage ; and his kind eyes smiled at her. And again he asked her if she could marry him. But first, before she answered, she must think of all she was giving up — it was a great thing that he asked of her. Most carefully he concealed the material advantages of the offer. In fact, the poor widow was left almost without means. Some small pension, a mere pittance, was all — but this the daughter must not know, if he could save her from knowing it.

Yes, she says. All that she gives up is nothing to her. She is simplicity itself : a daughter of science, handmaid of these old thinking men — without dreams, without cravings.

Then came the joy in learning that her mother is to go with her to the house by the sea. It will be all just the same — husband to work for, instead of father.

In this manner her quiet married life began. In the silent world of thought, time is a thought-standard only, to be taken from a shelf and used in some measuring-work, to be replaced upon a shelf and forgotten till the dust hides it ; in a sense, the years are flying, in a sense the years stand still ; rest is but an aspect of motion ; soon her mother lay by her father’s side ; it was yesterday that a priest put her hand in his, yet to-day is her twenty-third birthday, her twenty-fourth, her twenty-fifth birthday.

B

But at last Miss Effie burst into their days, stirring the stagnant hours : disturbing, stimulating, but most welcome. She was his great niece : the granddaughter of that sister who had gone to India with a soldier-mate so many years ago. Now the years had taken all : sister, nephew, nieces ; and this child of the third generation stood suddenly alone in the world. Mrs Burgoyne went to Brussels and brought her home to Uncle Richard — a black travelling companion with red eyes, who gave a spasmodic sniff as each speeding telegraph pole reminded her that they were hurrying farther and farther away from Brussels and the cemetery of Sainte Clotilde.

Effie, when the handkerchiefs became dryer, was the cause of many changes. Governesses must be procured — day governesses, and the sound of a piano broke the mid-day silence. There had been no piano in all the house, till Effie came. Then Mrs Burgoyne must take up a queer habit : she must go to church on Sundays, because the child must go there. Mrs Burgoyne was not a believer in the Christian revelation. How could she be ?

On that first Sunday, the congregation scarcely tried to conceal their surprise. The vicar seemed tempted to come down the chancel steps to express his pleasure in this un¬ expected visit and to urge Mrs Burgoyne to make herself at home. Perhaps another day she would bring her husband. The good vicar had always wished that Mr Burgoyne would attend divine service now and then — if only for the look of the thing. Somehow he never mentioned the wish to Mr Burgoyne, but he spoke of it to everyone else. It was “ disheartening ” — he used to say — and he believed if Mr Burgoyne could realise how disheartening it was, he would not stop away.

Mrs Burgoyne could not make herself at home on this initial occasion : she could not even find her place in the sacred book. But she knelt, stood, sat, bowed at the proper moment, found herself saying the creed, and suddenly felt almost ashamed, as an impostor that even Effie must bowl out before long. There was a missionary sermon that seemed to her palpably ridiculous, but one of the anecdotes made Effie cry again. In the churchyard, the friendly, foolish residents of the little place sought introductions to Effie and clustered to welcome her aunt upon hallowed ground. “Your famous husband ! Quite a long piece about him in the newspaper. Did you see it ? I could send it round.” They gauged every¬ thing by that — the “pieces” in the newspapers.

Effie made friends easily. In summer months when all the lodgings were let, she brought a strange procession of long¬ haired Mauds and Kates and loud-voiced Dicks and Herberts through the warm sunlight of the quiet garden and the cool shade of the quiet house. She assured parents and guardians that everybody would be “simply delighted ” if they cared to pay their respects at the Lodge. She even gave parties — rounders, and then tea. “The very kindest old gentleman you ever saw.” Thus mammas would tell their almost un¬ believable tale in Peckham and Brixton. “ Pm sure he was just as fond of shrimps as my Kate there. . . . My Herbert and he were as thick as thieves. He said that boy is a fine fellow and ought to astonish the world one day.” Too soon the summers waned — for Effie : too soon would come the hour of parting, clasped hands and clinging embraces at the railway station ; and then these sunburnt friends of happy youth would vanish utterly — never to return.

At all times, except during the tourist season, Effie in her childhood was a grand companion for Mrs Burgoyne. She dragged her from the dim thought-world into the dancing day¬ light. Outwardly they were aunt and niece ; inwardly they were playmates. When Effie commanded Uncle Richard to buy her a bicycle, she commanded him also to buy one for Aunt Sybil.

“ But, Effie, do you think she would like it ? ”

“ I am sure she would,” said Effie. “ You see, she may not know she would. She may think she wouldn’t. If you asked her, I daresay she’d say not, but I know she’d like it.”

“My dear, I believe you are right. I won’t ask her, I’ll get it.”

“Yes. And, Uncle Richard — I’ve been thinking, I’m not sure,” and she looked at him with a critical intentness; “I'm not sure, but I think you ought to get yourself a tricycle. They make them now with - ”

But the great man hurried from the room. He did not want a tricycle.

Certainly, at first, Effie may have seemed to assume too absolute a control, but from the first she was entirely sweet, entirely good. Discretion came swiftly to temper affectionate impulses with understanding hesitations. The world is not a nursery : quite soon she understood. Henceforth it was her care to guard the thoughtful peace of Uncle’s home and not to break it : only to laugh when Uncle needed music.

Above all else, she loved to help him — or to think she was helping him.

“Uncle Richard! Don’t you think I might do a little tidying ? ”

“Well, my dear Effie, I shall be very glad of your assistance — later on ”

“ Not now ? ”

“You see — the fact is,” said the author of Structural Principles apologetically, “ I am in the middle of a book now, and I have always made it a rule to peg away at the book — postponing everything else, till the book is done. We always tidy between books.”

“ Then do hurry up with the book,” said Effie. “ I’m dying to begin.”

Ill

“IT TITH that fellow to help me,” said Mr Burgoyne, en-

V V thusiastically, “ I could work double tides.”

Young John Stone had been an immediate success. He was a medical student, who had just obtained his diploma from the R.C.P. of London — the most brilliant pupil that Reece had seen in his classes during fifteen years : an all¬ round man who already, at twenty-two, seemed assured of a big career. When there came that breakdown in health which too often is sequential upon premature development, Reece wrote to Burgoyne and told him all about the young man. He wanted change, and, if not rest, a relaxation of the old strain, fresh work in lieu of the old work ; but he was poor, and it was not easy to know what one could do for him. Now if, by chance, Burgoyne was in need of a competent assistant in almost any field of research, Reece’s invalid would be just the man.

Burgoyne, as it happened, needed such a man. Mr Edmundson had recently gone away to get married : young Mr Stone came to the Lodge on a sort of holiday engagement. He was silent, modest, cheerful, unobtrusive : in a day all the little household felt at home with him.

“ Ah,” said Mr Stone to Mrs Burgoyne, with a grave smile, as she showed him the big work-room. “ So this is where the Spirit sits brooding over Chaos. I have seen this place in dreams.”

Mrs Burgoyne told her husband that she thought it was one of the nicest things she had ever heard said about him.

“ Too nice,” said Mr Burgoyne. “ I hope the young fellow isn’t a flatterer.”

‘‘Too wise to be that,” said Mrs Burgoyne. “ But he looks dreadfully ill.”

Then, quite an hour afterwards, the great man chuckled.

“What is it, Dickon?”

“The Spirit brooding over Chaos!” and the great man laughed merrily. “ The young dog has tickled my vanity. I do hope he isn’t a flatterer. ’

He was not a flatterer. He told Mr Burgoyne that he plainly detected indications of long-continued waste of time. All round the big room there were signs of leakage : tiny vents through which the precious moments were dribbling. It was astonishing how, in one week, he had grasped the main prin¬ ciples and the most intricate developments of Mr Burgoyne’s working system. The room and the work were really one. If you understood one, you understood the other : Mr Stone understood both most completely, as though by instinct.

All these big portfolios — dozens of them — lying in drawers in this great press contained the notes : the marvellous notes of a lifetime’s unceasing thought and painful search. This was the store-house of ascertained facts and digested, docketed, codified law products. Quite so. Well, there was nothing wrong with the portfolios except this : the front of the drawers should be converted into hinged flaps. Any decent cabinet¬ maker — there ought to be one in the village — could effect this change. Precious moments would be saved in dropping flaps instead of pulling out drawers.

Now with regard to all these question-and-answer cards ! Oh yes, that was obvious. These were sent out to all likely quarters when Mr Burgoyne was seeking first-hand statistics under any head. The colour of the printed cards indicated the subject, or group of subjects, of course. For instance, as Mr Stone observed, red was, roughly, biology; green, socio¬ logy. Well, a lot of the answers were sheer waste of time to read — obviously the information was not first-hand but copied out of books. These correspondents had thought only of their own reputation and, in dread lest the great man should all unconsciously put them on an everlasting pillory by citing them in footnotes as authorities, they had flown to the latest text books. “Who is Wren?” asked Mr Stone, abruptly.

Wren, said Mrs Burgoyne, was their neighbour, the clever doctor who was good enough to interest himself in the distri¬ bution now and then of red cards.

“ Wren knows what he is about, but he has got into a groove,” said Mr Stone. “And he seems never to have heard of half the German hospitals.”

Kind Dr Wren, it seemed, was responsible for the loss of many moments.

All these books on the close-packed shelves were — it went without saying— Mr Burgoyne’s working tools, and the desir¬ able thing, of course, was to keep his tools ready to his hand. But his assistants should introduce method into the arrange¬ ment of his tools ; the books should be kept moving on the shelves. Those two small adjoining rooms, instead of being employed as mere overflow reservoirs, should be made a sift¬ ing department. Mr Burgoyne’s books, moving from year to year as they grew old and exhausted — if they ever did become exhausted — and in accord with the fluctuating character of their importance when considered in relation to the work itself, should pass slowly round Mr Burgoyne’s big room and out into the back of the sifting department. Mr Burgoyne, like all great workmen, worked with few tools : it should be easy to arrange.

Assistants should not, merely because they were assistants, be careless of their moments. Mrs Burgoyne, who was really the secretary, no matter what other aid her husband had re¬ ceived, must take up typewriting. She would find typewriting quite an amusement. Some lithographed letter forms should be obtained for replying to manifestly impertinent and foolish strangers. With pain Mr Stone had calculated an average waste per morning of forty-three minutes of Mrs Burgoyne’s own time when dealing with the day’s post.

Thus Mr Stone, looking about the room with dark eyes, had seen the moments dribbling away in all directions.

Filling one of the large window recesses there was a strange and untidy collection of what the household called Mr Bur¬ goyne’s toys. On either side was a capacious toy cupboard with many drawers, and between the cupboards, just below the window, ran three stout shelves, on which one might see jam pots, bottles of chemicals, cardboard boxes, zinc trays with leaves and buds floating in slimy liquids, glass-prisons wherein poor little weeds were kept under anaesthetics during protracted operations, and what not fantastic, messy, and in¬ explicable. The fact was that Mr Burgoyne seemed to enjoy checking things, going over old ground with little ingeniouslycontrived experiments, making good other people’s work ; and it was odd how often he made it bad. Like Darwin, he was not clever with his fingers, but he was surprisingly inventive and ingenious.

All this summer, as he played with his toys, plant tissues had formed the basis of his amusement. Morbid growths, light and heat as unhealthy stimulus, etc., etc., had seemed all his thought as he played with his toys, when perhaps all the time, if one knew, his real thought had not been of diseased plant tissue, but of diseased brain tissue. But, whatever he was really thinking of, he plainly derived pleasure from watch¬ ing the manipulative skill of Mr Stone when set to work in the window. He stood as one spell-bound while Mr Stone cut microscopic sections, or rubbed his hands in delight as Mr Stone performed his task on the dissecting board and beneath the lens pithed out reticulated vessels, or separated membrane from wall in the minute stem of a dandelion or common groundsel. The young man’s dexterous precision was really charming.

In the experiments themselves, Mr Stone’s assistance proved invaluable. The gardener had brought his master half-a-dozen tender young seedling wall-flowers in pots, and Mr Burgoyne was subjecting Cheiranthus Cheiri to studied persecution : retarding, stimulating, poisoning, mutilating, remorselessly tor¬ menting. One pot formed the stage of a marvellous toy, in the construction of which Mr Stone surpassed himself. The idea was to entomb the unhappy plant in a cardboard dungeon, or “a little ease,” and hold it in darkness — save for one shoot, above which the sunlight was to be introduced through a paper window-shaft. Thus all the energy of the victim would be directed towards hasty cell-construction in order to reach the light : the plant would, as it were, stand on tiptoe and almost break its back in its endeavours to attain this warped elonga¬ tion. Then, with cotton threads, miniature pulleys, and weights running in slots, a cap was to be neatly fitted upon the growing-point, and the wretched plant would be compelled to measure for all observers the desperate strength expended in this abnormal effort. Really it was a pretty, if a cruel, toy.

Stone seemed to shut his dark eyes and blink from admira¬ tion as Mr Burgoyne unfolded his little plots. He could not in a hundred years have invented such ruses, but he carried them through grandly.

There was no doubt of Stone’s sincere admiration. He spoke of it to no one at the Lodge, but he spoke of it to Dr Wren, and found this gentleman to be quite of his mind. Dr Wren, when invited to the Lodge, was, in fact, as proud as if he had been going to dine with a king. He welcomed young Mr Stone at his snug little house at the top of Harbour Street, and, during long, shoppy talks of an evening over their pipes in the library-surgery, showed himself an unexpectedly strong man for a seaside doctor, even if he was ignorant of the latest achievements of the German hospitals.

“I call it a privilege,” said Wren, puffing hard at his big wooden pipe, “ to sit in the same room with him — just to see him, and hear him speak — on any subject. But to work with him — day after day ! Stone, honestly, I think you are one of the luckiest men in England.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Stone, “at first.”

“ At first ? ”

“Yes. I’ll tell you what I mean. You know he has been extraordinarily kind to me. He has given me praise altogether disproportionate to the extent of my feeble services.”

“Yes,” said Wren gravely: as though this might well be, “ that is his way always. But he means all he says — it is a part of his greatness to — to make the best of all lesser things.”